He Stopped Asking You To Come

She noticed it the way you notice a clock has stopped, which is to say a long time after it happened.

There was a Saturday in the summer and the fixture list was on the fridge, and she was free, actually free, for the first time in five weeks, and she said to him at breakfast that she would come and watch.

And he looked up, and there was a half second where something crossed his face, and then he said: oh. Yeah. Okay.

It was not rudeness. It was surprise. He was surprised that she was coming, and underneath the surprise there was a small readjustment happening, and she saw it, and she has not stopped seeing it since.

Because sitting there with her toast she did the arithmetic and worked out that he had not asked her to come to anything since about March.

Not once. And she had not noticed, because when a child stops asking, nothing happens. There is no scene. There is simply a silence where a question used to be, and a parent who is very busy experiences that silence as a slightly easier week.

He is fourteen. He used to ask constantly. He used to stand in the doorway of her office with his coat already on saying it is at half eleven, it is only twenty minutes away, in the specific voice of a child making a case. And at some point in the last eighteen months he stopped making cases, and she cannot tell you when, and he did not announce it, and it was not a decision he would be able to describe if you asked him.

He simply learned the answer. That is what a child does. He collected enough data, over enough Saturdays, and drew a reasonable conclusion, and stopped spending the effort.

She went to the match. He scored, which was almost worse. And on the way home in the car he talked more than he has talked in months, and she drove and listened and thought: I did this. Not by any single Saturday. By the ordinary accumulation of a life that has a lot of other people in it.

Who was keeping the children back

There is a scene in Mark that everybody knows in outline and almost nobody looks at properly, and when you do look at it, it is about ministry.

People are bringing children to Jesus. And the ones who stop them are not the crowd, and not the Pharisees, and not the Romans.

And they brought young children to him, that he should touch them: and his disciples rebuked those that brought them. But when Jesus saw it, he was much displeased, and said unto them, Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not.Mark 10:13-14

His disciples rebuked those that brought them.

The people doing the work of the ministry are the ones keeping the children away. Not out of malice. They are protecting a schedule. There is a teaching happening, and there are adults with real needs waiting, and a group of children is, from where they are standing, a manageable interruption to be managed.

And Jesus is much displeased. It is one of the few places in the Gospels where that word is used about Him, and it is aimed at His own team, for exactly the thing you have been doing accidentally for eighteen months.

So hear this, in a car with your son talking beside you: He is on your side in this, and He was displeased on your son's behalf before you noticed anything. That is not my sentiment; it is what His word records about who was keeping children back and how He reacted, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a scene like that and makes it land in a woman with toast going cold.

Now let me get at the guilt, because guilt is going to be no use to that boy at all.

The sentence in the car was I did this. And there is enough truth in it to make it stick, which is why it has stuck. But look at what the disciples in that story were actually guilty of. They were not guilty of not loving children. They were guilty of a reflex, formed in a busy life, that read a child as an interruption. That is a habit and not a character, and Jesus corrected it in one sentence and then got on with blessing the children.

He did not lecture them. He did not require a period of remorse. He said forbid them not, and He picked the children up.

You are not condemned about the last eighteen months. His word puts the correction and the blessing in the same paragraph with nothing between them, and the Holy Spirit is not the one running an inquiry in your kitchen about every Saturday since last autumn.

And here is the one I want you to have, and I want to be careful about how I say it, because I am not going to promise you an outcome.

I do not know what a fourteen year old does next. Nobody does. What I know is what Jesus says the children are entitled to: to come, and not be forbidden. That is a standing invitation from the Lord Himself, and it does not run through your diary. Whatever happens between you and your son, that boy has access to Christ that no schedule of yours has ever been able to obstruct, and He was displeased with anybody who tried.

You may bless him without commanding him. Scripture never once puts another person's heart under somebody else's authority, and the Holy Spirit is the one who works in a boy, at His own pace, in a way no parent has ever been able to arrange.